Windows 7 Backup identifies wrong drive as a system drive

This is a silly problem to be having. I have two operating systems in a dual boot system. Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit, C drive, (where I am trying to run the backup from) and Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit (I drive).

It used to work fine, I think round about 4 weeks ago or so. I am not sure what has changed but it no longer works properly. Instead it identifies my data drive as being a system which needs a system image created for.

I tried using the Backup reset registry key from the tutorials section but that does not work either. They say a picture can paint a thousand words, so here are some screenshots.

I am not sure what else you need to know. Its Dell XPS 420 with a RAID 0 (striping) drive...that is to say two drives combined together in an array (as I understand it). So it acts like one big hard drive.

Any help would be most appreciated!

Welcome to the forum,

From your screenshots I don't see the problem you're talking about, Can't you just select the partitions you want and go from there?

What does it show when you expand the top "Data Files" ?

Thank you for the welcome :)

In the "include system images" at the bottom of the backup it shows "Data (F)" as being one of the images. I enclose a more clear screenshot. Apologies!

My concern is that although I could possibly uncheck that box, if something does go wrong with my Windows and I am no longer able to boot into it, then restoring the files alone will not be enough to make it work properly. As I understand it, it needs to be a system image for it to work correctly. I don't actually need a "file backup", I need a system backup say for instance if I am installing new drivers and Windows dies or whatever and can't get into safe mode.

I hope you understand my concern, and see what I am talking about when I say Backup is choosing the wrong drives. (I want C and I selected).

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Okay to give a rundown on whats on what drive....

C - Contains Windows 7 Home Premium and associated programs.

D - OEM Recovery partition.

E - CD ROM Drive.

F - Data. Contains Audio files, Downloads (about 12GB - lots of patches etc) , CD Images such as ISOs etc, Games folder, Miscellaneous other programs that I don't intend to be permanent such as FreeOCR, nitroreader pdf, nlite, openoffice etc and finally System Volume information (which seems to appear on every drive but is always inaccessible),


G - Backup and virtual machines.

I - Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit.



WIth regards to libraries, there are links to G and F in both of them (eg for music there is a link to F, and i created a library called downloads whcih also links to F, Documents links to G....



I am going to boot into Vista and see if there is anything odd there...see if Vista for some reason marked it as a system drive.

I found the answer eventually, hidden away in the middle of a microsoft forum where it was not the actual answer, but seemed to help me.

It seems, that Windows Backup bases a system drive on criteria that include "any drive where a service is launched from".

I recently upgraded Nitro PDF reader which put a service in it. That was in my F:\progs directory. This made Windows Backup think that my F drive was a system drive. GRRRRRRRR.

(You could ask, why I would have a folder called progs somewhere separate from my system drive, but its usually portable stuff or things I don't want for very long).

I hope this helps someone else - save them from hours of searching if nothing else.

Thank you VERY much for your help derekimo and Brink :)

Thank you for posting back, it will definately help someone else.

You're welcome and we're glad you got it figured out. :)